Dr. Melody Goodman never had a Black professor – not as an undergraduate or as a graduate student. When a graduate school mentor asked her if she thought about going into academia, she responded, “Of course not. Why would I think about that?”
Now Goodman is associate dean for research and an associate professor of biostatistics at the New York University College of Global Public Health. She and her colleagues recently published a report on the racial diversity of 28 public health schools, a follow-up on a 1999 study called “The Shape of Our River” on student and faculty diversity in public health.
Her research, 20 years later, found that diversity improved in public health schools, but “at a glacial pace,” she said. “I think we’re focused on this issue, but we’re not seeing the outcomes I would expect, given that focus.”
Using data from the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, the study found that 40.7% of bachelor’s degrees from these programs went to minority students in 2016. From 1996 until then, enrollment for underrepresented graduate students at public health schools rose by almost 11 percentage points. Meanwhile, the portion of minority faculty with tenure nearly doubled between 1997 and 2017.
That all sounds pretty good. But the numbers show slow progress, and even slower change for some affinity groups in public health schools.
For example, between the two studies, the percentage of Asian graduates who earned master’s degrees in public health jumped by 8 percentage points and doctoral degrees by 5.6 percentage points with even smaller increases for Hispanic and Black graduate students.
The percentage of Hispanic master’s degree earners increased by 5.9 percentage points and Hispanic doctoral graduates by 4 percentage points. For Black graduate students, the percentage of master’s degrees only rose by 1.6 percentage points and doctoral degrees by 3.9 percentage points. Meanwhile, the percentage of Native Americans with master’s degrees actually decreased 0.3 points and the percentage of Native Americans with doctorates only increased by 0.3 percentage points.
